The right to be forgotten, created by a 2014 decision of the European Court of Human Rights, allows individuals to ask search engines to remove links to stories with personal information that is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive." The underlying story does not have to be removed from the Internet; it will just be much harder to access. The CNIL sent a notice to Google on May 21 and ordered Google to apply delistings under the right to be forgotten not only to domains available in France or other European Union Countries, but also around the world.

We are concerned this requirement will adversely affect ASNE members by limiting access to their content and also by impacting their ability to access important archival information. Our letter raises four key concerns about the CNIL notice:

It will signal to other, more repressive governments that it's OK to apply their laws extraterritorially to any speech that is on the Internet, which effectively subjects online speech to a "least common denominator" standard with regard to free speech protections.

The CNIL's reliance on the "accessibility" of speech on the Internet is not an adequate rationalization for censorship.

The prohibition on a search engine that notifies an underlying website that a story has been "delisted" does not allow the website to effectively make the case against delisting.